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... bedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The age distribution is seldom taken into consideration in macroeconomic, and macroeconometric papers. This in spite of the fact that established economic theories predict that demographic factors will affect the aggregate economy. This paper focuses on economic growth and investigates empirically the influence of age variables on growth. Unlike other recent papers on the subject, the focus here is on annual data and individual countries, namely Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Estimations of a typical growth specification, augmented with age variables and other, more volatile, economic variables, are carried out, and results from these regressions seem to indicate that economic growth is indeed affected by the age distribution. The effect does not disappear when the specification is reestimated using an instrumental variable estimator in order to correct for the potential endogeneity of the economic variables. Since the age variables are highly correlated with each other, experiments with ridge regressions are also made in order to mitigate the collinearity which obscures the results when all of the age variables are included in the regressions. JEL: J11, O40, O57 * I am grateful for valuable comments from Jonas Agell, Thomas Lindh, Bo Malmberg, Fredrik Sjöholm and seminar participants at Uppsala University and the ESPE 1997 conference. Research funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. ÃDqpv Can fluctuations in a country's age structure help explain economic growth? Indeed, does the age distribution have any relevance in macroeconomic studies? In macro-empirical papers demographic factors are seldom taken into consideration in spite of the fact that several established economic theories, e g the life-cycle theory of savings and the human capital theory, predict that the demographic situation will affect the aggregate economy. According to the life-cycle theory of savings (e g Modigliani & Brumberg 1954 , 1979 there is a connection between specific cohort behaviour and aggregate savings and consumption. The Bentzel effect (Bentzel 1959; Modigliani 1986) , for example, predicts that there will be a positive correlation between growth and savings due to higher lifetime resources, and therefore savings, of younger cohorts relative to the dissaving of retired cohorts. More complicated versions of the life-cycle model, where life-cycle earnings and family needs are added, naturally can make the age structure of the population even more influential, although the sign of the correlation with growth will be less determinate. The human capital theory (e g Becker 1962; Mincer 1962) has been the dominant theory in the wage-determination literature. Recognizing the fact that learning by doing is an important source of human-capital formation, a typical result of this theory will be that a worker increases the hours worked early in life in order to rapidly accumulate human capital. A worker's stock of human capital will then peak in the middle ages, towards the end of the working years. A nation's stock of human capital should then, ceteris paribus, benefit from a labour force with a large number of experienced workers. As for empirical evidence of age-distribution effects, there are some studies focusing mainly on savings, for example Mason (1987) and Horioka (1989 Horioka ( , 1991 . Berg (1989 Berg ( , 1996 finds a correlation between varying cohort sizes and savings and the composition of aggregate savings. Blomquist and Wijkander (1994) simulate an overlapping generations model with demographic changes of a baby boom type and find patterns which resemble actual macroeconomic patterns.